Income and Wages

This brief provides an overview of the current state of India's social security system and raises questions about how to best streamline and restructure the current fragmented approach to iteratively move toward universal provision that extends coverage to more people.

JustJobs Network Research Associate Jit Shankar Banerjee recently published an op-ed in the Myanmar Times proposing key reforms to the incoming government to increase productivity, while ensuring a high minimum wage floor and social protections such as healthcare and pensions.

Case studies from Brazil to China, from the United States to Germany, reveal that to square higher wages and competitiveness, governments must adhere to three rules of thumb.

Given the impact access to data can have, governments around the world have a responsibility to improve their data monitoring capabilities and increase the data that they are sharing with researchers and the public.

Policymakers must recognize that the heatwave does not only impact the livelihoods of farmers and daily-wage labourers. Any strategy to mitigate the negative effects of climate change on livelihoods should also incorporate urban street vendors. A first start would be fixing the issues of the 2014 law and ensuring provision of basic facilities.

A new report by the IMF and Economist Intelligence Unit acknowledges the importance of quality jobs, calling the JustJobs Index a "valuable look at income and employment security and working conditions."

From the recent experience in Myanmar, Adithya B. Kumar from CESD and Tanja Matheis from JJN, discuss the process of reaching consensus on minimum wage rates and how research organizations can help to facilitate fact-based decision making among stakeholders.

Prakash Loungani, Chief of Development Macroeconomics at the IMF Research Department, writes about the gap in IMF's existing policy framework, with respect to concerns about technology-induced job losses in the short-run, and provides key recommendations aimed at harnessing the long-run benefits of technology adoption.

The 10-chapter volume examines a rich diversity of wage-related policy issues from around the world: wage inequality in Brazil; minimum wage setting in decentralized Indonesia; the gender dimensions of agricultural wages in India; and the impact of state-level minimum wages in the United States, among other topics.

This report analyses and contextualizes the wage developments in the garment industry in five Asian countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Vietnam.